On Fridays I suggest worthwhile weekend reading that’s guaranteed to improve your posture, your online dating prospects, and make you an all around better person. Read a dozen articles, lose five pounds.
First, our weekly photo quiz. Here are photos of two of this country’s big cities. This may be a clue: the bird-fly distance between these cities is some 4,444 kilometers. Can you name the country? For extra credit, can you name the two cities?
The answer is at the end of this post.
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Now, a few suggestions for your weekend reading:
Everyone who travels can relate: Frontier will no longer take your call, encouraging fliers to make contact via chatbot. Alaska Airlines is removing check-in kiosks at certain airports, driving people to its app. Air France, KLM, and Ryanair have all suspended customer service on Twitter. Chatbots are taking over, and it’s a mess. Somehow, Airline Customer Service Is Getting Even Worse
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Twitter is a used to be. New sites are called things like Semafor, Air Mail, Punchbowl News, Puck. Puck? What is one to make of these names, which have the unsettling, archaic quality of early Tintin translations? The New New Reading Environment
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“In Britain, we are ruled by the descendants of an illiterate Viking warlord who came to this island one thousand years ago to massacre its people…. The royals … remind us that all our dry fiddling around with interest rates sits at the end of a very long chain, stretching back to the first man who smashed another man’s head in with a rock.” On royalty In England’s Dreaming.
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A scholar, artist and heir to a considerable fortune, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey set off from his native France in 1842 for a tour of the historic archeology of the Eastern Mediterranean. But, more than just an eager sightseer, Girault de Prangey planned to capture such famed structures as the Acropolis in Athens and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem via daguerreotype – the world’s first publicly accessible photographic process – with the intent of publishing and selling his images. See the Mediterranean as it was captured in some of the earliest surviving photographs
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ChatGPT, Bard and Bing today are pretty hit or miss. If you use them, you might find this advice on how to sharpen your queries helpful. I did, a little. Get the Best From ChatGPT With These Golden Prompts
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The Scale of the Universe. Start anywhere.
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A Ukrainian newspaper reported on the preferences of Ukrainian ministers, several of whom have watches that cost more than $30,000. These officials are wearing on their wrists the equivalent of four or five years of an average Ukrainian's salary. That tells Ukrainian taxpayers either that they are paying their public servants too much, or that their public servants have other ways of getting money to buy watches that they would not be able to afford otherwise. It’s Peter Singer: Why pay more? To be conspicuous.
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Book review. Humans should not be too impressed with themselves and animals show that cognitive chops are surplus to requirement. Here, it seems that being good enough suffices. If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity.
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All the land in the modern world is already owned. New generations are born with "a kind of existential debt". Private ownership of land made sense so long as it always seemed possible to find more land somewhere but now, Land Ownership Makes No Sense.
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Every hour, across the world, around 742,000 freshly hatched male chicks are born. A few hours later, they’re tossed into a grinder, which kills them instantly, or gassed with carbon dioxide, which knocks them unconscious before killing them. (Rarer methods include burning, electrocution, suffocation, and drowning). Save the male chicks
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Wealthy countries are angling for access to the resources of poorer countries to power a "clean energy" transition. But this transition is about so much more than that. The Mineral Rush
I’m trying to educate myself on this subject – lithium extraction and, more broadly, neocolonialism, so I’ve come up with this selection of articles and papers that address the question. I haven’t read them yet myself; that’s what weekend reading lists are for. Maybe we can come back and talk about them in a few weeks.
The rush to ‘go electric’ comes with a hidden cost: destructive lithium mining • Lithium in the Green Energy Transition: The Quest for Both Sustainability and Security • The Lithium Wars: From Kokkola to the Congo for the 500 Mile Battery • Climate colonialism and the EU’s Green Deal • A Power Struggle Over Cobalt Rattles the Clean Energy Revolution • Shifting Mining From the Global South Misses the Point of Climate Justice
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The answer to this week’s photo quiz? It’s Canada, and the two cities are Halifax, above, and Vancouver.
There are more photos in the Canada Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
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In tomorrow’s week in review we’ll talk, among other things, about how MAGA voters are cowards, how the world it got isn’t the world the Biden administration expected, we’ll look again at the looming NATO summit, we’ll have short takes from Cambodia, Iran, Scotland and Uganda, and we’ll finish with a look back at some Covid predictions, and how they turned out..
Happy reading. See you here, tomorrow.
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Hi Bill - I hope you are well. Not sure if you have already seen the architectural photos quizzes in the NYT travel section (there have been 3 so far) but you might enjoy them. Here’s a link to the latest:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/16/travel/abstract-architecture-quiz-iii.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
I’ve failed miserably but you might do better.
Warm regards,
Mitchell